The Lost Trails of Paul D’Allmen

While ‘Jackrabbit’ Johannsen has been celebrated for his dedication to skiing, he was far from the only person out in the woods developing trails. Another pioneer, too long unsung, cut, marked and documented many trails in the Laurentians, and started before the famous Maple Leaf Trail was conceived. His maps survive, but for the most part, his trails have disappeared beneath the developing communities between Ste. Anne des Lacs and St. Sauveur, or have lost their identity, being absorbed into other trail systems. Nothing is named in Paul d’Allmen’s memory, yet he was present, not just in skiing, but when his generation was called upon to go to war. Most of us have stories of ancestors like d’Allmen, stories of people who arrived in Canada like unwanted plants pulled from a garden and thrown to the side, but determined to survive in the new soil. Some had easier starts than others. Paul d’Allmen was one of the others.

Elizabeth Schurch von Allmen had to carefully examine her options in 1893 after the death of her husband Fritz. Living in Interlaken in the canton of Bern in Switzerland, a region that had not yet discovered its modern vocation as a premier tourist destination, she lacked the resources to properly provide for her 10 children. Among the options open to her was to emigrate. Leaving what had been home to the von Allmen family since the 1200s was a drastic measure, but even their new life in Geneva could not supply them with the essentials for survival. A resourceful woman, she found a position for herself with the Parkers, a wealthy family from England, and soon departed, leaving her teenage daughter, Emma, in charge of the younger children.

While some of the older kids adapted to their new life in Geneva, others, including Paul, followed their mother. The Swiss government had a policy of encouraging emigration as a means of reducing the human burden on the Swiss infrastructure. The local council offered the equivalent of six month’s wages for anyone who emigrated, but if an emigrant returned, he would have to pay the money back with interest. It was a cold, hard policy aimed bluntly at reducing the numbers of society’s most needy. Six months’ wages must have seemed like a considerable grubstake to someone who could not find any wages at all. Elizabeth, their mother, had earned the respect of her British employer and could help her children find work, so she could boldly encourage them to leave. She found her daughter Martha a position as the nanny for the Holt family, and she encouraged Paul to leave Switzerland. He began working for the Parker family, and within a year he was hired as a butler for the Drummonds, while his older brother became their groom.

Paul von Allmen arrived in Canada in 1910 with Lady Drummond. He became the butler at their home on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal, and being only 16 years old, was soon as much a part of the family as he was a servant. He must have idolized his employer’s dashing son, Guy, who volunteered for service when the Great War began in 1914. Guy enlisted in the 5th Royal Highlanders.

When the Canadian armada set sail in October 1914, it was the largest army that had ever crossed the Atlantic. Most of the soldiers, Canadian volunteers, had never seen action and, in Flanders, would participate in one of the most horrific battles in the history of war. By late April 1915, both German and Allied forces were locked in conflict in the two-dozen kilometres between Ypres and Passchendaele, digging themselves into defensive trenches, churning the ground into a sea of mud. To break the stalemate, the Germans introduced the use of poison gas to the battlefield. The first victims, soldiers of the French army, were overwhelmed, and being unfamiliar with this new weapon, they retreated downwind – and therefore moved with the gas. They sustained heavy casualties, leaving the Canadians almost surrounded by numerically superior German forces. Incredibly, the concept of defeat or surrender did not occur to the isolated Canadians. Thanks to the quick thinking of the Canadian front-line doctor, A.C. Scrimger, the stubborn Canadians adapted to the gas attacks by holding urine-filled kerchiefs over their faces. They rapidly replaced a series of fallen officers, advanced on the German positions, and regained the line. At one point, when a particularly popular leader was killed, a cry of anguish could be heard and the soldiers pushed on, the deaths making them more determined. As romantic as it might sound today, these men were trudging through thigh-deep mud and the abandoned corpses of soldiers in a garish nightmare world of barbed wire and exploding shells. In the midst of this madness, working to help the French re-establish their line, Captain Guy Drummond was killed.

In Montreal, Paul was twenty-one and had married a co-worker in the Drummond household named Rhoda Clark. When the news of Guy’s death got back to them, Paul von Allmen presented himself for enlistment and Lady Drummond closed down her home. To his surprise, Paul learned that his very name, von Allmen, centuries old and meaning ‘public pastureland’ in the mountains of Switzerland, was too German. He had to change it for his own safety. Dropping the prefix ‘Von’ he added a d’ and on May 15th Paul d’Allmen enlisted in the 2nd University Company of McGill.

By November 1915, d’Allmen fell victim to influenza, the killer that took the most lives during that war, but he recovered. He was wounded a year later at the Battle of the Somme, but again returned to active duty. Another year later, he was wounded in the First Battle of Passchendaele on October 19th, but again returned to the front lines. Finally, he was reported killed on the first day of the Second Battle of Passchendaele on October 30th, one of the most vicious battles of the war, and notice was sent to his wife, Rhoda.

By November 1915, d’Allmen fell victim to influenza, the killer that took the most lives during that war, but he recovered. He was wounded a year later at the Battle of the Somme, but again returned to active duty. Another year later, he was wounded in the First Battle of Passchendaele on October 19th, but again returned to the front lines. Finally, he was reported killed on the first day of the Second Battle of Passchendaele on October 30th, one of the most vicious battles of the war, and notice was sent to his wife, Rhoda.

Back home in Montreal, Rhoda had endured her own hardships, losing their two-day-old daughter. It may have been receiving the news of the death of her husband that finally broke her resistance, and she also contracted influenza. Cared for by d’Allmen’s mother, both women suffered the burden of the loss, but soon it was followed with a message that Paul had survived. Initially, placed with other corpses, he was listed as dead, but on October 31st, someone saw him twitch, and he was rescued and sent home.

A part of d’Allmen’s skull had to be replaced with metal, and when Lady Drummond later offered to pay his tuition at McGill University, he tried, but in spite of a solid grounding in school in Switzerland, he could not keep up. As he described it, he had forgotten all he had learned. That part of his brain had been irrevocably damaged. While he was recovering in the Ste. Anne Military Hospital, his wife Rhoda passed away.

After the war and his recovery, d’Allmen found a position with Montreal Light Heat and Power Consolidated, a firm in which the Holts, the employer of his sister Martha, were founding partners. It is a testimonial to the impression that the von Allmens made upon their various employers that he was offered a job at all. He had been discharged from the military as unfit, and had to teach himself to walk. Rising to the challenge, he became involved in yoga and became an expert canoeist. His second wife, also named Rhoda, was eleven years younger than him, and they eloped in 1926. He certainly wasn’t a catch in the eyes of her family. She herself was raised by her aunt and uncle, and was rejected by her adoptive parents because of her decision to marry, but even she got cold feet after the wedding and fled from her husband. Three months after their marriage, Paul came to find her, having secured a place for them to live, and when their first child was born in 1927, her adoptive parents forgave and became more involved.

They had two sons, and taking long walks with them as children, Paul taught himself to walk with crutches. He also taught himself nutrition, discovering what he could and could not eat. He knew his survival was a miracle, and that he had to look after himself with great care. Those who knew him marvelled at his need to meditate, and knew better than to disturb him when he retreated into a trance-like state in order to preserve his health.

Many Montrealers first began to go to the country for the summer because it was cheaper than staying in Montreal. They would give up their city lodgings when the children got out of school and rent very inexpensive lodgings from a farmer. These summer homes boasted no plumbing, and because they were situated in farming country, food would also be reasonably priced. The children could run wild, finding new friends or even making themselves useful, and being free of the city also meant cool, quiet nights and clean air. The d’Allmens came north that way, with Paul staying in the city in cheap, simple lodgings in Verdun, and taking the train up north for the weekends.

Like many others, the d’Allmens became attached to the Laurentians. As they prospered, they found a permanent home in Ste. Anne des Lacs, and soon came up north in the winter also. Having grown up in the mountains of Switzerland, Paul cherished the stability of skis, and found peace cutting through maple stands or crossing a snow-covered farmer’s field on the side of a hill. He soon began to map the trails he travelled.

In 1931 he produced his first map, calling it simply ‘Laurentian Ski Map.’ Carefully drawn in India ink on a sheet a bit shy of four square feet, representing about 300 square miles, it shows Ste. Agathe in the top left corner (northwest limit), Mont Rolland dead centre, and encompasses the area south of Lesage in the bottom right (southeast limit). It includes Ste. Margeurite du Lac Masson, Ste. Adele, St. Sauveur, Morin Heights, Shawbridge, Val Morin, Val David, Ste. Margeurite Station and St. Hippolyte complete with the roads, railways, contours, miles of ski trails with their names, and about ten resorts. The names on the map include Lover’s Leap, Devil’s Jump, Cote du Sac au Dos, and intriguingly Trail of the Fallen Women, a name that seems associated with nothing more than a couple of amusing spills. Skiers would recognise most of the resort names – Chalet Cochand, Laurentian Lodge Club, Bellevue and others. While there is a trail called Johansen(sic), and the trails connect right across the territory, there is not yet any trail called the Maple Leaf. It would come later, as Paul d’Allmen would eventually draw over 40 such maps of the region. His son, Fred, still a resident of Ste. Anne des Lacs, can account for 43, and there are likely others that were lost or destroyed. Some of the maps were hung in railroad stations to guide skiers, and one was copied and made into a place mat for The Pub in St. Sauveur. Many of the maps are signed Paul d’Allmen, Chairman of the Trails Committee of the Laurentian Zone.

D’Allmen used a compass and an altimeter, basing the maps on aerial and geodesy information. He walked and skied the trails, marking and cutting, and in the process left us documents of a much different time, when people skied through pristine woodlands and open fields with a specific destination in mind. One of his maps shows St. Sauveur with every street and house marked in with the owners’ names. His maps were not a commercial venture but a passion, and he did not encourage their commercialisation. His son, having inherited a bit of his artistic flare, illustrated some with trains, buses and skiers, and today he and his wife are the custodians of this unique heritage.

Paul d’Allmen died on May 3, 1981. He spent over 30 years mapping, marking and skiing trails, and some of his maps have been given to the Laurentian Ski Museum. There are many great names associated with skiing in the Laurentians. There is Emile Cochand, Hermann Johannsen, the Wurtle sisters, Gault Gillespie – we all know the list. It is time we add Paul d’Allmen and acknowledge his contributions to our skiing history.

References: Canada in Flanders by Sir Max Aitken, M_P_, The Official Story of the Canadian Expeditionary Force; Canadian Armed Forces war records information and personal and ski history generously contributed by Fred and Shirley d’Allmen

The Maple Leaf Trail

The first ski lift in the Laurentians was the railroad. Originally built to allow Laurentian raw materials to get to market, it rapidly found a more important role in transporting people to the Laurentians for recreational purposes. In 1909 Canadian Pacific inaugurated “Le Petit Train du Nord” and by the 1930′s, trains disgorged thousands of Montrealers at stations up and down the line. The trains, carrying as many as 10,000 skiers per weekend, were especially adapted for people to load their skis and poles, but there were no ski tows. The first rope tow was built at the cusp of the decade in Shawbridge (or Ste. Agathe, depending on who is telling the story). Most skiers were coming to do back-country skiing, and behind all their enthusiasm was an elderly Norwegian-Canadian who seemed to be able to keep up with anybody at any age and who was everywhere.

In 1875, the year Herman Smith Johannsen was born in Norway, John A. MacDonald was the Leader of the Opposition in the Canadian Parliament, Canada had seven provinces and the transcontinental railroad was still a political promise. Johannsen spent a lot of his youth skiing in the Telemark and Nordmarka regions of Norway, areas where skiing was purportedly invented and where evidence of skiers goes back over 4000 years. Skis were a reliable means of transportation in his growing up, and long distances and camping in winter were a part of the experience. He lived in Germany, the United States and Cuba before he settled permanently in Canada in his early fifties.

With the advent of the Great Depression, Johannsen, like many others, discovered that his livelihood had dried up. He, his wife, and three children began to see their lives as a camping trip and learned to make do. Any provisions for the future vanished as they moved from the city. Johannsen, dubbed Jackrabbit by the Cree, skied up and down every hill in the Laurentians and was always available to ski and to promote skiing. When, in the winter of 1931-32, the first Kandahar was run at Mont Tremblant, a mad bash through the woods down an undeveloped mountain, Johannsen skied down ahead of the contestants and timed their descent. That same year, he designed and oversaw the construction of the Montebello ski jump, a 300 foot high run from a tower built on the top of a slope near the Club. He cut trails at Mont Tremblant, Ste. Agathe, Ste. Marguerite, St. Sauveur, and just about every other area in the Laurentians. He set racecourses, awarded prizes and drew maps, but the project that seems to have held him was the idea of a ski trail that would run from Labelle to Shawbridge. This was his main trunk line, to be called the Maple Leaf Trail, and he gave himself over to it with an energy and determination that few of us have witnessed, let alone experienced personally. The idea was first conceived in 1932 in conversations with his son, and he envisioned it as a touring trail that would connect the inns, wandering through the mountains for 80 miles (128 km). He imagined families coming out for the weekend, disembarking from the train at Labelle or at another town, skiing south until late afternoon, spending a night at an inn, and starting out again in the morning, catching the train back to the city after lunch. Johannsen tried to get government support for the idea, but failing, he set off on his own. The Laurentians still had a lot of open fields and skiers were happily tramping through the woods, developing runs down hills, cutting farmer’s fences and not being very thoughtful. One of Johannsen’s first challenges was to mollify these farmers. He went to see many of them and worked out understandings that they would designate places where the skiers could pass and the skiers would agree, in exchange, not cut through elsewhere. Subsequently he mapped out and began to cut his trunk line.

As the Thirties passed, the trail took form and drew great interest. Johannsen’s project would draw all of the existing trails together, and in 1937 Canadian Pacific’s news department copyrighted its first Laurentian Ski Charts, checked by H. Smith Johannsen, and sold them for 25 cents each. In 1939, the Imperial Tobacco Company and the Montreal Gazette got together and asked Johannsen to produce a more detailed ski map of the Laurentian trails. The map, published as a booklet, was sponsored by Sweet Caporal cigarettes, and became referred to as the Sweet Cap book. By the time World War Two began, Johannsen felt that his services would be better offered to the military, training troops on skis. He was sixty-five, and the recruitment officer had the audacity to tell him that he was too old. Discouraged, he began to log the miles he put in, skiing over the trail in the course of his work. In 1940, he reported 980 miles (1,577 km), the next winter, 960 miles (1,545 km) and the winter of ’42-’43, 1,155 miles (1,859 km). Still, the military told him that he was too old.

Johannsen had help cutting the different sections of the trial, from Harry Wheeler between St. Jovite and the Ogilvy Farm (now Mountain Acres Golf Course) and Stan Ferguson working from the Ogilvy Farm south, while the Cochands and Johannsen worked on trails between Val Morin and Ste. Margeurite. Johannsen was involved in every sector, if not cutting then negotiating with farmers or putting up markers.

During World War Two, Joe Ryan, the developer of Mont Tremblant, helped fund the acquisition of a snowplough and Tom Wheeler, Harry’s older brother and owner of the Lac Ouimet Club, together with Ken Harrison of the Laurentide Inn, arranged with Hector Perrier, the Member of the Assembly for Terrebonne, to get paid to plough Route 11 from St. Jerome to St. Jovite. They were paid 50 cents a mile and dubbed their plough ‘Hector’ in his honour. According to Stan Ferguson, though, the open road challenged the Maple Leaf Trail, because when people began to come up north by car instead of using the train, they tended to go to the developing ski hills.

After the War, the Sweet Caporal Maps were republished, but with the proliferation of downhill skiing and the increasing numbers of roads, Johannsen had his hands full promoting backcountry and cross-country skiing. Many times, the Maple Leaf Trail had to be rerouted to bypass a road or real estate development and the ski hills drew more people to the slopes. Still, Johannsen persisted through the 1950′s and 1960′s, and the same elderly Norwegian-Canadian was there to help organise when cross-country skiing experienced a rebirth in the 1970′s. Even in his hundredth year, Johannsen was a presence during the Canadian Ski Marathon that ran 100 miles (160 km) from Lachute to Cantley.

Today, even though some stretches of the Maple Leaf Trail still exist, the role of a trunk line running through the woodlands is filled by other trails such as the one left behind from that original ski lift, the old railroad.

Val David

The town of Val David, the location of the first settlements north of Ste- Adele, was once known by its post office, Mont Morin. Named for A.-N. Morin, it opened in 1873. The first few families, the Ménards and the Dufresnes, were larger than life, both figuratively and physically. Two Menard brothers married Dufresne sisters and the Dufresne brother did right by a Menard sister. It is no surprise that the Ménards’ mother became known far and wide as La Mère Ménard. Smaller than her sons, she was about six feet tall and was a woman to be reckoned with. One story is told about her private trout lake: It was completely off-limits for anyone without her say- so and a poor would-be poacher discovered the penalty one morning when he was spotted fishing on the shore. La Mère Ménard lumbered out to the pond in her night-gown, picked him up, put him over her knee and spanked him. These early settlers, Morin’s colonists, were colourful and industrious. They were the men and women who came north to establish a new settlement in Les Pays d’en Haut, a phrase that resonated in French like “Out West” once did in English. They established mills, farms, hotels and stores.

In the 1890′s when the railway came through, the new station was named Belisle’s Mill in honour of Joseph Belisle, who owned a mill for grinding grain, sawing wood and carding wool. He was not the only miller in this progressive little corner of Ste. Agathe. When the parish broke away in 1917, it became known as Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-Belisle in honour of the mill as well as of the priest in the mother parish of Ste. Agathe, Curé Jean-Baptiste Bazinet. The town was incorporated in 1921 using the same name, mostly out of habit, but in 1923, the post office was renamed Val David in honour of L.O. David. It fell to the large institutions, Canadian Pacific, the church and the Post Office to name their properties, and the name of the Post Office soon became the colloquial name for the region.

Laurent Olivier David was born in Sault-au-Récollet in 1840. At 24 years of age he began his practice as a lawyer in Montreal and within one year was co-owner of the publication le Colonisateur. He went from there to becoming editor of L’Union Nationale and by 1880 owned La Tribune. During that time and for the balance of his life he was a loyal member of the Liberal party, having run and lost in five out of six elections, and was eventually recognised for his statesmanship and accomplishments with a seat in the Canadian Senate in 1903. During his career he also wrote and published 16 books including studies of the patriots, Papineau and Laurier. Laurent Olivier was one of the eminent men of his time, but his success was not limited to his public life, as his progeny would demonstrate. Although not their only child, he and his wife Albina Chenet could take pride in their son, Louis Athanase David.

Louis Athanase, born in Montreal in 1882, began his law career in 1905. While he did not follow his father’s career into journalism, he succeeded where his father had failed in politics. He won Terrebonne for the Liberals in 1919 and continued to represent the area with wins in six successive elections. He was a minister in the cabinets of both Gouin and Taschereau. It was early in his term as minister that he created the literary prize Le Prix David. In 1940 he followed his father to the Senate. While he is acknowledged for his long service to our region, he is best remembered for creating the literary prize. Today, the Prix du Québec recognises achievement in many cultural disciplines including literature, cinema, music, architecture and design. Athanase David had good reason to create a prize for writing since both his father and his father-in-law, G.A. Nantel were leaders in the fields of literature, journalism and history. Louis Athanase David died in January 1953 and is buried at the Catholic cemetery in Ste. Agathe des Monts, the home of his wife’s family.

In 1944, St-Jean-Baptiste de Belisle changed its name officially to Val David in recognition of both father and son. In the years that followed, Val David grew into its name by becoming a centre for arts, music and crafts. The legendary La Butte à Mathieu was one among many boîte à chansons that sprang into life, and soon other artisans found Val David and an artist’s colony flourished, as though in gratitude to Athanase David for having done so much for Quebec culture.

In the meantime the David family continued to make its mark.

Dr. Paul David was born in Montreal in 1919. He studied medicine in Paris and in Montreal. He specialized in cardiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Hôpital Lareboisière in Paris. On his return to Montreal he founded the Montreal Heart Institute in 1954, the year after his father died. The institute went on to have a world-class reputation and was the first in Canada to perform heart transplants. It continues to be a world leader in cardiology. Dr. David authored 170 publications in his discipline, was involved in many American cardiology institutions and societies and was a co-founder of both the Canadian and Quebec Cardiology Foundations. The list of awards and recognition that he received in his lifetime includes Companion of the Ordre Nationale du Québec, the same organisation that awards the Prix David, named for his father. In 1985 he, too, was named to the Canadian Senate, in recognition of his contributions to society. Like his father, he cherished his connection with our region. He owned a country home on Trout Lake in Ste. Agathe for many years. He died in Montreal in 1999.

Val David still maintains its strong identity as a centre for the arts and culture. The backbone of its economy is still dependent on the descendants of the Dufresnes and the Ménards, but the David family will always be remembered for their strong presence here.

The Ouananiche

Many of the small headwater lakes feeding the North River were named for fish, mostly varieties of trout. There are a limited number of varieties, and therefore it is reasonable to assume that they travelled through the river system to colonize different lakes. They must have scaled rapids, climbing natural fish ladders, eventually filling a lot of lakes with just a few different types of trout. Their goal, sparkling clear water, bubbled out of the rocks as though it were being created underground, and the lakes, rivers and even the streams were eventually teeming with trout.

We have degraded their environment for two centuries, each successive generation adjusting to new norms of reduced numbers of fish, as though stepping down our own staircase or fish ladder of degradation one generation at the time.

Long before the Bible was written, the huge Laurentide Ice Sheet finally retreated northward leaving behind, stamped into the Canadian Shield, the rock formations, lakes and valleys that are our heritage. As the ice sheet receded, the forests, the animals, the fish and the earliest human settlers slowly moved in, living in a harsh but balanced relationship. Throughout the millennia, this balance would be maintained, complete with its unforgiving winters and hot summers, and people adapted, dependent upon the woodlands and the bounty in the life-giving, pure waters.

It is very hard to estimate how many people lived in the Laurentian river valleys and along the Ottawa during these ancient times, because they had such a light environmental footprint that their tracks are hard to follow. To try to get a perspective, though, the Americas were settled – and shared in trade and commerce – long before the Europeans arrived, and according to Charles Mann in his book 1491, the human population of our continents prior to the arrival of the Europeans was greater than Europe’s at that time. He describes not just settlement but two established civilisations complete with their own written records. While the northern peoples who lived here were on the periphery, they knew how to produce goods to use in trade and acquired essential products from their southern neighbours in exchange. The Huron, for instance, traded cornmeal for dried fish with the Weskerinis (Petite Nation) Algonquin of our region.

Measuring the time since humans moved into the ecosystem that had slowly replaced the receding glacier, the earliest settlements in the Laurentian river valleys occurred around the same time as Abraham left Ur, as related in the Book of Genesis. On that measure, humans have lived in these valleys for perhaps 4000 years, and for the first 3800 years, they maintained a balance with our rivers, flora and fauna living with forests dominated by enormous white and red pines, trees that rose in places as high as 20 storeys, broken only by lakes, rivers and Iroquoian farms, from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic coast. The other two hundred years began with the felling of these giant trees during the wars with Napoleon and with the construction of the first mill in St Andrew’s East in 1805. As the trees disappeared, rivers would float logs, be channelled, and lake levels would be adjusted in an effort to harness the simple energy of flowing water with little regard for the bounty it contained. Surviving ‘la drave,’ and struggling to maintain themselves as the river’s shores became degraded, the fish would still remain a significant resource throughout the 1800s.

We know today how destructive our management has been; in fact, we have known there are problems with our practices for almost half the time since that first mill was installed. In his History of Argenteuil, published just over a hundred years ago, Cyrus Thomas recounts a story in which a Mr. Clark drowned. While the teller, E.S. Orr, does not give precise dates, the event happened before the 1830s when Clark brought grist to the Lachute mill to have it ground. While the miller was processing it, Clark “went to fish for salmon, which were then to be had below the dam, and was drowned.” Salmon? In Lachute? Two hundred foot high trees? This is not British Columbia but our own Ottawa River Valley and the basins of its tributaries. Records do not suggest an awareness of rapid degradation, but dwell instead on economic successes and setbacks. Beside the simple word ‘mills’ in the index of Cyrus Thomas’s book, there are 23 references. The same index does not contain the words Algonquin, salmon, or even pine. Degradation, it seems, was normal. In fact, it was progress.

In his 1912 history of Ste. Agathe, Dr. Edmond Grignon mentions fishing for ouananiche, a land-locked salmon that is thought to occur where trout and salmon meet. He rails against the sawmills and dams, and blames them in part for the disappearance of the abundant fish population. He warns that Ste. Agathe was losing its status as the fisherman’s paradise. He mentions also that the introduction of southern minnows, used as bait, were destroying the trout eggs and calls on the authorities to monitor and correct the problems. That was 95 ago, 107 years after the first mill was installed in St. Andrew’s, and he was sounding the alarm about degradation.

The ouananiche were present and may have been the salmon that Mr. Clark hoped to catch, but they are gone, extinguished from the North River, without even a place-name to commemorate them. The trout are struggling to survive and the salmon may never make it back. Different groups have come forward to try to clean things up, but each generation is like a single step of that staircase, each one wanting the river to be put back to the way it was when they were younger. The very top of the steps is too far back for anyone to remember. Today, though, the mills are gone, the dams serve no economic purpose and the forests are coming back. Today, we can dare to dream that we can put things back the way they were, the way the Weskerinis Algonquin people knew them. We can imagine and encourage gigantic pine forests and a river teeming with trout. Is it a dream beyond our reach? Perhaps. But maybe we can encourage our children to look back up the staircase to the top. Maybe we can achieve the goal of returning our river basins to the state they were in 3800 years after Abraham left Ur.

Terrebonne

An avid gardener living on the rocky terrain of Terrebonne, I cherish any good soil where I can find it. As a child, I was told that the names of our two counties, Argenteuil and Terrebonne, were chosen to induce unsuspecting farmers to homestead. Terrebonne suggested ‘good soil,’ and Argenteuil outdid Terrebonne with the word ‘silver,’ or ‘money,’ right in its name. Further north, Val d’Or offered even greater rewards.

When I learned that Argenteuil was a family name, I assumed that there must be a similar explanation for Terrebonne, dismissing the childhood explanation. Recently, though, I stumbled upon the origin of the name Terrebonne explained on the Toponymie Quebec website, confirming the story I had heard as a child. According to this source, André Daulier Deslandes, the first seigneur, chose the name because of the fertility of the soil. I sneered cynically but read on, discovering the original seigneurie bordered the Milles Iles River, and that it was rather fertile farmland. I also discovered that Deslandes, who had been accorded the seigneurie in the 1670s, had never even seen it and made no effort to develop or otherwise exploit the seigneurie, and two subsequent owners treated it as cavalierly. It wasn’t until Louis Lepage, the parish priest of nearby Ile Jésus, acquired the seigneurie half a century later that it began to be developed. I suspected that there must have been another reason for it to be called Terrebonne and soon discovered a well-trodden path to the answer to this riddle.

When the Compagnie des Cent-Associés failed as a commercial venture in the 1660s, its assets in New France were acquired by the Compagnie des Habitants. The French king, Louis XIV, dissolved the original company and, under his new superintendent of finances, created and funded both the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, to oversee development in Canada, Louisiana and St. Domingue, and the Compagnie des Indes Orientales to look after trade and colonisation from Persia to India. This was France’s first commercial colonial empire, and it was a force to be reckoned with, second only to Great Britain. Over time, the superintendent would set up other companies to look after the many holdings, commercial ventures and colonies in Africa and the Far East.

Deslandes was 42 when he joined Jean-Baptiste Tavernier on a trade mission for the Compagnie des Indes Orientales in 1663. Tavernier was one of the great traders of the epoch. A jeweller by training, he had connections in Persia and India, and was among the foremost diamond importers and the favoured supplier to Louis XIV. Deslandes hired on as one of his assistants. They travelled to Persia and traded throughout the Middle East. While Deslandes was disappointed with his weak position, as Tavernier traded without consulting the rest of his party, he never lost his admiration for Tavernier. He was 15 years younger than Tavernier, the senior member of the expedition. This trading mission would be the last of Tavernier’s six recorded trips. While Deslandes was in awe of Tavernier, both men are remembered for their ability to document their travels. Today, their expeditions survive in ‘Les Beautez de la Perse’ by Deslandes, and ‘Les Six Voyages…’ by Tavernier. Both books are still treasured and available from book dealers.

When Tavernier returned to Paris in 1668, he was awarded a peerage, but being a Huguenot during a period of intolerance in France, he acquired the Barony of Aubonne in Switzerland. Some five years later, Louis XIV awarded Deslandes a seigneurie in Canada. The choice of location may have had to do with his having moved from the role of a local manager of the Compagnie des Indes Orientale to become a secretary of the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, whose mandate included Canada. It could have been a starting bonus or an incentive for this seasoned traveller to become implicated in the Americas, and while it failed to motivate Deslandes to visit his new holding, he named it Terbonne (sic).

In his book La Seigneurie de Terrebonne, Henri Masson suggests that Deslandes may have chosen the name Terbonne as a counterpoint to Tavernier’s Aubonne, one coming from good soil, and the other from good water, (Eau-Bonne), mis-spelling Terre Bonne to be consistent with the presumed mis-spelling of Aubonne. The latter comes from the Aubonne River, which had previously been called the Albunna, and among many theories for its origin, one states that Aubonne may come from the Old French ‘aube’ for ‘white’ or from Latin ‘albus’ meaning ‘white’ or ‘divine water.’ The suffix ‘onne’ means ‘spring’ or ‘river’ in Gaulois. There is also a castle called Esbon in Aubonne that has a dedication quoting Psalm 31 in which the word ‘bons’ is used, and a modern interpreter has concluded that the phrase was chosen because ‘bon’ means fertile soil in some unidentified language.

The riddle may never be completely solved, but we gardeners in Terrebonne work tirelessly towards that goal.

Rue Sir Mortimer B. Davis, Ste. Agathe des Monts

As you drive along Chemin Lac des Sables in Ste. Agathe, you will notice a little road turning up a hill, away from the lake, called Rue Sir Mortimer B. Davis. The short street climbs past some recently built homes that look somewhat similar and ends at an imposing four-storey stone mansion with a copper roof. Even from the small street, you can see that it has a commanding view of the lake. You might rightly assume that this house belonged to the man for whom the street is named, but that won’t tell you much about the man himself. If you resort to Toponymie Quebec to learn more, you will learn that he was born on February 6, 1866 and died on March 22, 1928, was the founder and president of the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada, that he helped set up Mount Sinai Hospital, and that he built the mansion, calling it Chateau Belvoir. The Imperial Tobacco Company’s archives will tell you more.

Mortimer Davis was born in Montreal and attended Montreal High School. After he graduated, he went to work for his father in the family business: S. Davis & Sons, Cigars. He was the third of seven children in a modern Jewish family and these influences encouraged him to make a difference in the world. By twenty-one, he had some significant success experimenting with growing tobacco. He never lost interest in this aspect of cigarette production, and is credited with having established commercial cultivation of tobacco in Canada. He also headed Ritchie Cigarettes, and negotiated with the Imperial Tobacco Company of England to create the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada. He was offered directorships in many companies and his influence grew, but he never lost sight of his roots. Following the example of his parents, he gave to many charities, including Notre Dame, Montreal General and Mount Sinai hospitals. He was not a religious man, and, while he remained a member of Temple Emanu-El, which his father had helped found, he also gave to other charities in the Jewish community, becoming its largest single benefactor.

In 1898, he married Henrietta Meyer of San Francisco, and among his closest friends was another American, Thomas George Shaughnessy. Lord Shaughnessy, whose name is associated with CP Rail, did not grow up in the Montreal English establishment, but in the more modern civil tradition of the United States. He is rumoured to have quit a prestigious private club upon learning that it had refused membership to Davis on ethnic grounds. Shaughnessy owned a lovely property overlooking Lac des Sables in Ste. Agathe, and he was the one who encouraged Davis to buy the property next door.

Château Belvoir was built around 1909, around the same time that Davis discovered that one of his benevolent investments was not working out as planned. He had put money forward on a loan basis, most likely interest- free, to help establish Eastern European Jewish immigrants and refugees. One group had secured a loan and established a commune, also in Ste-Agathe. They sought to make a community based on their Eastern European communist ideals. The original farmer, Calixte Laframboise, was only too happy to sell the place. Once the trees had been removed, the thin soil and the short season proved too harsh to support a family, let alone a community. When the last commune member left, Davis was obliged to take over the title. This was the furthest thing from his desires, and so he immediately turned it over to a doctor who began receiving tuberculosis patients. By 1913, Davis and a few other businessmen had supplied the doctor with a new building on the site, and they called it Mount Sinai Hospital, the first Jewish-community funded public hospital in the Montreal sphere of influence.

When war broke out a year later, Davis set about financing a Jewish battalion to fight for the British. It was for this action that he received a knighthood, but over the next ten years he would finance Jewish religious schools, donate a fully equipped new building to the YM-YWHA, remain a major contributor to two Montreal hospitals, as well as Mount Sinai, and endow a law chair at Laval University. He maintained an active role on many boards and of course guided the growth of the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada.

In the 1920′s Davis’s marriage broke down. Both he and his wife Henrietta, Lady Davis, had taken to spending long periods of the year in France, and they continued to go there separately. Davis wished to marry his manicurist, Eleanor Curran, originally of New Orleans. Since it would be unbecoming for a knighted gentleman to wed someone of such a background, the story is told of how the Italian Count Moroni, down on his luck, married and quickly divorced the American woman. He managed to be much more ‘comfortable’ after the divorce, and Sir Mortimer proceeded to marry the jilted Lady Moroni.

Sir Mortimer Davis had one dream left to fulfill, and that was to see to the creation of a major Jewish-community hospital in Montreal, one that would facilitate internship for Jewish medical graduates, and would carry Davis’s name. To accomplish this, he stipulated in his will that 75% of his estate go to the creation of such a hospital fifty years after his death. While his will also provided large donations to both the Montreal General and the Notre Dame hospitals, Davis believed that it could take 50 years for his estate to grow large enough to build a whole hospital.

Lady Davis, on a crossing to France, met someone who was looking for investors. She had been awarded one million dollars in her divorce settlement, and she was attracted by this man’s ideas. In this way, her divorce settlement provided the seed money for the company we know today as IBM, and Lady Davis became very wealthy in her own right.

When her ex-husband died, she felt that his estate was not being properly managed and she took the executors to task, forcing a change that would ensure that his wishes would be respected. When World War Two began, Lady Davis fled her home in France in advance of the Germans, and, returning to Canada, she financed two air force houses for Canadian pilots and donated the first Spitfires to the war effort. At the conclusion of the war, she was honoured as a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Subsequently she founded the Lady Davis Institute, dedicated to helping educated European refugees re-establish in Canada. It was located not far from the Jewish General Hospital, which became the Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital upon receipt of his bequest.

Rue Préfontaine, Ste Agathe des Monts

The name Préfontaine has long been associated with Ste. Agathe, not just with the street, but also the area where Mount Sinai Hospital once stood. Like many others in our region, the Préfontaines were Montrealers who chose to vacation in Ste. Agathe and in the process became involved in the community.

Joseph Raymond Fournier Préfontaine was born into a farming family in Lower Canada, or Canada East, in 1850. He attended Collège Ste-Marie and later studied law at McGill College. At 23, he was elected Mayor of Hochelaga, and two years later, in 1875, he ran and won a seat in the provincial Legislative Assembly for Chambly. Ambitious and active in many different areas, it is hard to imagine that he could adapt to the slow pace of the countryside.

Préfontaine married Hermantine Rolland in 1876, and they suffered the loss of several children at birth. Only three of their children survived into adulthood. Driven by hard work, perhaps in part by these tragedies, he won a seat in the House of Commons in 1886 while maintaining an active law practice and serving the town of Hochelaga. Once Hochelaga was annexed, he served on the Montreal municipal council, and subsequently became Mayor of Montreal in 1898. He also maintained seats in each federal election until 1905. He was a very popular federal politician and one of the favoured sons of French Canada.

From 1900 to 1902, Raymond Préfontaine, the Mayor of Montreal, was also the Member of Parliament for both Terrebonne and Maisonneuve ridings. He simultaneously held three political posts, any one of which would be perceived as a full-time responsibility today. Running for two or more seats in the House of Commons was not illegal until 1919. There was a House rule that said if a member won more than one seat, he should resign the extra seat or seats. But there was also a law that stated if your seat was being contested after the election, you could not resign until the challenge was resolved. In this way, MPs sometimes found themselves forbidden from resigning the seat that they did not want to keep. For the Party leader, running in more than one riding made sense, but any candidate could do it.

In 1893, the year after the train first arrived in Ste. Agathe, Préfontaine’s brother-in-law, Octavien Rolland, purchased the property known for the next 25 years as Rolland’s Point but now as Greenshields Point. Rolland, whose father founded Rolland Paper, and for whom Mont Rolland was named, must have received his sister and brother-in-law as houseguests many times. By 1899, Mr. Préfontaine had acquired a parcel of the Chalifoux farm and built a lovely summer house on Lac des Sables. It featured a tower and eyebrow dormers and was accessed through an ornate gate sporting the words ‘Les Sapins’ in a light arch of woven sticks above the entry. Located at 182 Tour du Lac, it has been renovated and restored many times and has always been the home of influential Montrealers. It evoked ease and relaxation, belying the lives of its occupants.

It did not take long for the Préfontaine family to get involved in the life of their adopted town. A year after the house was built, Rolland Prefontaine, an engineering student and the eldest son of Raymond and Hermantine, helped the Compagnie d’Aqueduc et de la force motrice des Laurentides build a hydroelectric facility on the North River. A year after that, around the time Préfontaine became the MP for Terrebonne, the village council decided to name various streets and install proper road signs. For the main entrance to the village, the road that ran from the railroad station up to the Tour du Lac, they chose the name Rue Préfontaine. Virtually everyone coming to Ste. Agathe had to arrive by train, and their action served to remind all visitors of their affection for the honourable J.R.F. Préfontaine.

Aside from his legal practice and political responsibilities, Préfontaine sat on both the Catholic School Commission and the Harbour Commission of Montreal, was a director of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the St. James Club and the Canadian Club of Montreal.

In 1902, he resigned both Terrebonne and Maisonneuve seats, as well as his post as Mayor of Montreal, and assumed the role of Minister of Marine and Fisheries. He was subsequently re-elected in Maisonneuve in a by-election and named to the Privy Council. In his role as minister, he travelled to France to negotiate a marine agreement. He also undertook the delicate mission of acquiring a wedding ring for his eldest son, Rolland, to bestow upon his future bride. Sadly, he suffered a heart attack in early December and died in Paris on Christmas Day, 1905. He was fifty-five. His funeral, held in Montreal late in January after his remains were returned on Queen Victoria’s private yacht, was one of the largest funerals Montreal had seen.

References include both the federal and provincial government websites and Edmond Grignon’s 1912 historic album of Ste. Agathe. With special thanks to Monique Préfontaine DeSerres and her family.

Pripstein’s at Filion

Each time Chaim Pripstein stepped off the train into the crisp Laurentian air near Omer Filion’s farm, he must have felt a tug of nostalgia for the peace that he had known in rural Poland. Arriving in Montreal in 1930, he was drawn to the countryside, not just for economic reasons but also to be able to escape the constant hustle and bustle of the city. He was a Hebrew teacher at the Jewish People’s School but the position could not offer a living wage, in part because the teachers could not bring themselves to charge the impoverished immigrant families. He taught himself to be a peddler to supplement his income.

As the train pulled away on its journey up the line towards Weir, the only mechanical noise in the countryside faded with it. When a steam train let passengers off at a rural village, they often had to wait for the local horse-and-buggy transport to arrive after the train had gone because the engine was so loud that the horses would shy and could not be brought close to the station until the noise had receded. This was not the case at Filion’s since his respectable farmhouse was only a walk from the whistle stop where the name Filion stood proudly on the side of the tracks. Pripstein would have some time to fill until the noisy thrum of the steam engine again echoed through the valley announcing its return, and with each visit, the time passed more quickly.

No one chose the vocation of peddler in childhood, but during the days of the Great Depression many hardy people were looking for work and those who could speak French went to some of the suppliers and offered to peddle their wares from town to town, making what they could in the process. It was a hard and unpredictable life that would separate them from their families for long periods. It was open to those who spoke French, but what could a Hebrew teacher, who spoke no French, do? Chaim Pripstein decided that he would just have to learn French as quickly as possible. Being a teacher of Hebrew, he knew the Torah, and he knew it was almost the same as the Christian Old Testament. The solution was easy; he acquired a French bible and, based on his knowledge, he read it and thereby learned French. What could be more logical? Shouldn’t a man build on his strength, and wasn’t his strength a knowledge of the Hebrew Bible?

It was easy for Filion to respect Pripstein because this peddler spoke with a strong inflection that evoked the priests and the words of the Bible. Filion and Pripstein developed a good relationship. The train would be due back in the morning, and Filion, with characteristic French-Canadian hospitality, offered Pripstein a room for the night. Pripstein accepted, but insisted on paying. Eventually Pripstein asked if he could rent two rooms for the summer. School was out and it was cheaper for the family to live in the country than in Montreal. The Filions were a large clan who owned a series of peaceful, bucolic rolling farms on the North River, one belonging to Omer, one to his brother, Bruno and one to his son, Camille.

The experience of a summer on Filion’s farm would influence the course of the life of Pripstein and his family. They grew attached to that open stretch of the North River, the towering aspen, and the hospitable farming neighbourhood. They learned about Côte à Boucane – Smoky Hill – the local name for the Buchanan farm to the south; the rhythm of the berry season, the regular, chugging interruption of the steam-drawn train coming past, stopping only when there were visitors or supplies to be dealt with. They swam in the North River and the children chased frogs in the shallows in the silent, clean country air. Over the course of two summers, they discovered that they always had houseguests – friends – urban refugees who also needed a break. While they enjoyed the company, they could not underwrite the costs, and Pripstein reluctantly convinced his hospitable wife that they would have to turn this into a business. They dubbed their rented premises Pripstein’s Hotel.

Pripstein realised that he would not attract customers without indoor plumbing. When he presented this problem to Omer Filion, the old man was sceptical. As far as Omer Filion was concerned, the outhouse served him well and he saw no need to bring that “merde” into his clean house. Chaim offered to install indoor plumbing at his own expense and Omer finally accepted, provided that his good friend remove it again at the end of the summer. Many of Omer’s neighbours came by and marvelled at the plumbing and were soon installing it in their own homes. Omer gave in and the plumbing stayed.

As their business grew, the Pripsteins became more expert at caring for their guests, and in response to parental requests, they set up a small residential camp for about 10 children on the premises. There were 2 counsellors with a program of athletic and cultural activities. Over time, Pripstein bought several parcels of the land from Omer Filion. With his help, they built a summer camp complete with a playing field and tennis court.

On one particular sunny summer afternoon in 1941, the Pripstein’s 12-year-old daughter Shirley was in the bunkhouse when she heard a terrible noise and the whole building began to shake. Feeling responsible for the younger children, she told everyone to get under the beds, but the next thing she remembered was climbing out of rubble, the building gone, and watching as people rushed excitedly around, bringing children to the dining room. A tornado had swept through the camp, destroying trees, closing down the roads and smacking into the bunkhouse, knocking it over and throwing the piano clear across the river. Thankfully, Dr.Etzioni had just arrived for a holiday and was soon performing surgery on the dining room table.

It was on another summer afternoon some time during the 1950s that Chaim Pripstein received a visit from the Officer of Public Health. During the course of a friendly conversation, he told Pripstein – off the record, of course – that the river had become too dirty for the children to swim in. The residue of industry and tourism was taking its toll as towns used the river as a catch-all sewer system. The peaceful farming community was changing, disappearing under the pressure of a new era. Sadly for Omer Filion and Chaim Pripstein, the death-knell had sounded for the first location of Pripstein’s Camp.

Chaim and his family explored further afield, looking for what they had once had, while the Filions grew into the urbanizing fabric of the encroaching town of St. Jerome. The camp found the peace it sought and relocated to the shore of Lac des Trois Frères in St.Adolphe where it still thrives seven decades later, run by a Pripstein grandson. While Omer and his sons are gone, his descendants live up the hill on Côte à Boucane, near the highway. Power lines cross the busy Autoroute; Filion’s whistle stop and even the CN right of way have disappeared under the asphalt, and the hillside has been reshaped by urban sprawl, but Shirley Pripstein and her husband Immanuel Braverman still cast a nostalgic glance at a particular tree on the North River near St. Jerome each time they speed by along the Laurentian Autoroute.

Palomino Road, Ste-Agathe

Palomino Road runs between Route 329 and Route 117, joining Lac Brûlé to Lake Manitou in Ste-Agathe. It is a long gravel road fenced for some distance, and there is a lovely old farmhouse at one of its curves. The Commission de toponymie has no information on its naming, but many people remember the Lodge. For forty years it was a busy hotel with riding and skiing and it was instrumental in bringing a lot of families to the Laurentians.

The property once belonged to Melasippe Giroux, a farmer among the many who eked out a living in the hills between the two big lakes. His farm bordered a smaller lake that bears his name today. The Giroux family hung on until 1908, fully 16 years into the real estate boom that began with the railroad and saw almost every farm in the area change hands. Giroux sold to Morris Ryan, the owner of a Montreal dry cleaning business. Ryan had no reason to believe that the land would ever be farmed viably. With open, stony fields rising from the shore of tiny Lac Giroux to treed hilltops, the farm had never been able to provide more than subsistence. The frost-free season is short, only reliable for about 80 days and the evenings are generally cool. Ryan bought the property just to have a country retreat, a gentleman’s farm. Over the next twenty years, he would sell off and buy back pieces, wanting to share his bucolic getaway but not quite sure how to do it. Little could he foresee the day his son-in-law Henry would come looking for a new start in life on this run-down rocky farm.

Henry Kaufmann was a driven man who worked his way to a tidy fortune during his twenties and early thirties. One of nine children, he would not apply himself academically and so was apprenticed to learn carpentry. Having received payment in some shares, he soon discovered that trading in them could be much more lucrative than carpentry, and he took to his new career with the determination of a skilled labourer. Despite his hard work, he was not prepared for what happened on that fateful Friday in October 1929 when his wealth simply ceased to exist. Henry was 34 years old and had to start over.

His father-in-law received him at the farm and assigned him the challenge of using his carpentry skills to build a log house. He disappeared into the bush and built one. Ryan was probably thinking that they could sell the house, and that Kaufmann could build another. They were trying to figure out some way to create a livelihood on the barren farm that Giroux had abandoned. All that they had used it for until then was riding horses. The Depression was not a good time for real estate, though. Instead, Kaufmann built a lodge, and Ryan and he arranged with the Rabiners of Montreal to run it for them.

In those days, Montrealers came to small lodges in the country for their holidays and they had the choice of many hotels and inns, each with a special feature. The ones on the shores of large lakes could offer boating, canoeing and swimming. Lac Giroux was not really large enough to do much boating, but the Ryans had horses and miles of trails.

When Rabiner left to set up his own hotel, Kaufmann, undaunted, built an even larger lodge and a huge stable. He depended on hardworking employees, and he drove them hard. One who stood by him for many years was Arnold, a World War One British cavalryman. Arnold looked after the stables, and guests remember him as a character. He knew the horses and he loved Dalmatians. These he raised on his own, letting them breed with no more than the detached interest that a farmer might take in his farm dogs.

In the early part of the century, riding was a major recreational activity in the Laurentians, predating skiing and water sports, and it only grudgingly gave way to skiing through the 1930′s and 40′s. During that period, Arnold’s stables had over a dozen horses and the trails to go with them. Kaufmann had a particular love for palominos and so he named the hotel Palomino Lodge. Palomino horses are not a breed, but simply a distinct golden colour. Breeding two palominos will give you a white horse; a palomino and a sorrel will produce the palomino colt with the 14 carat gold colouring and the white mane and tail.

Among the many guests received at the Lodge was Lorne Greene, who later became famous as the father in the television series Bonanza. The Lodge also housed Princess Elizabeth’s retinue in the early ’50′s when she visited Canada prior to her ascension to the throne.

Henry Kaufmann and Berenice Ryan ran the lodge until they sold it to one of their regular guests, Sam Steinberg, in 1956, and while the Kaufmanns never had children, in a sense the Lodge stayed in the family, as Henry’s nephew had married the daughter of the new owner. Henry, though, went back to the stock market. He and Berenice moved back to Montreal where they were involved in many charities and they left their estate to a foundation established in their names.

Palomino Lodge became a retreat for Steinberg’s employees until the 1980′s, at which time it was acquired by the Apostles of Infinite Love. The new owners let the property run down and over the years the fields and roads were abandoned to the woods. The building achieved some notoriety again in the 1990′s when kids accidentally set fire to the old lodge, and with the road gone, local residents watched as water bombers skimmed the surface of nearby Lac Brûlé and doused the flames. It has changed hands several times and the buildings are now gone and the farm and horses are only fading memories. Today it is a vacant parcel of land fronting on Palomino Road.

Thanks to Elliott Kaufmann and Robert Levine for sharing their memories.

Mount Baldy

Mount BaldyIt is hard to know how many Algonquin or Innu hunting parties picked their way down the rapids of the North River below Lac Raymond near present-day Ste. Margeurite Station. They must have seen the strange, bare mountain, a rocky hump, a landmark, telling them how far they were from home. Over many centuries, they surely named it, but their name has not come down to us. Later, in the 1840s, and ‘50s, the first settlers moving beyond A.N. Morin’s experimental farm in Ste. Adele may also have named it, but if they did, their name is also forgotten.

Still later, the surveyors who located the railroad along the bottom of the river’s valley would certainly have seen it, and perhaps they even indicated it on their first plans. If they called it anything at all, that name is lost to us too. Even the many passengers who came up the line after 1891 seem at best to have observed it passively. It remained unnamed until the first skiers found a purpose for it.

Aleksander Olsen, a Norwegian engineer who moved to Montreal to design grain elevators, won five combined ski jumping and cross-country competitions at the Cote des Neiges jump between 1911and 1916. The jump was on Cote des Neiges across from Decelles. Like many other Norwegians, he took full advantage of our winters, skiing wherever and whenever he could. Cote des Neiges and the park boasted trails lacing all over the mountain, but Olsen and his friend Sverre Øsbye did not limit themselves to Mount Royal Park. They used the train to go up to the Laurentians where the snow was deep and conditions always reliable.

The steam engine could not pull the whole train past Ste. Margeurite Station, so it had to stop there and pull the train up to Ste. Agathe and Square Lake one half at a time. Olsen and Øsbye were not likely to have had the patience to wait for that kind of manoeuvring. Outside the window, the snow looked too tempting. Abandoning the train, they took off through the woods along the North River.

Some of the early hills they identified served only as landmarks, means of finding their way back to the railroad station at the end of the day. One of these markers was that same rocky outcropping whose name had still not been established. Olsen and Øsbye used it to orient themselves from their first winter visit in1911. They could see it from anywhere in that part of the North River Valley, and, with Olsen’s engineering training, it was easy to judge the angles of view and find their way back to the station to catch the home-bound train.

In my childhood on Lac Raymond, we went for outings down the falls below the lake, and we learned about the mountain. In fact, it developed significant religious value to me because my mother invoked it when she shared her oft-repeated lesson of how faith could move a mountain. If those early skiers had known that, they may have had less faith in it as a landmark, but it would not have stopped them from trying to conquer it. Olsen and Øsbye did. With other courageous — or crazy—young men, they climbed it and found their way back down, a good day’s exercise.

After Olsen and Øsbye returned to Norway in 1916, skiing continued to gain popularity in the Laurentians. In 1917, Emile Cochand opened the first dedicated Laurentian ski resort not far from the bald mountain, and soon trails were being marked through the woods and skiers glided from hotel to hotel. Øsbye stayed in Norway, creating the first commercial ski wax, but Olsen returned to Montreal with his new wife and son, Kaare, in 1923. He continued to work in construction, and in 1932 he used his professional skills to design and rebuild the ski jump on Cote des Neiges, the site of his earlier championships. His construction came to be called the Turret Ski Jump. Jumping had become so popular that 3000 to 4000 spectators would come out to watch the competitions, which could include 150 or more contestants. Coming from Three Rivers, New England and Ottawa, they were often accompanied by military bands playing ‘ommpah pah’ and spectators milling around. The cross-country aspect of the combined races took the contestants from the Turret up Westmount mountain, down across Cote-des-Neiges Road, up Mount Royal, around the Cross, through Outremont, back down to Decelles and across Cote des Neiges where organizers would shovel snow on the road and the tram lines to allow them to get back to the starting point.

Skiing became so popular that people, following the pioneers to the Laurentians, even began to regularly climb the bald mountain and race down as best they could, like Olsen and Øsbye had done. Among contestants and participants in these races were people like Pierre Cochand, Viateur Cousineau and – my mother, Pat Paré. She shared the story of Heinz von Allmen, who at one time ran the ski school at the Alpine Inn. He made it down Mount Baldy in 57 seconds, and thereby earned the nickname Heinz 57, the well-known steak sauce.

Kaare Olsen remembers his father telling him that he and his friend Sverre Øsbye called the rocky outcropping Mount Baldy, and the name stuck. Today, many people know the mountain that way, and the road running along the North River near the old Ste. Marguerite Station is called Rue du Mont Baldy, but if you want to get a really good look at it, you might want to put on a pair of skis and ski over the old railroad line along the river. You might even have to get off the line and ski into the woods, but you won’t get lost if you see it. You can always use it to find your way home.

Mont Tremblant Park

In 1894, Dr. Camille Laviolette of Laval University convinced the Quebec provincial government to set aside a large parcel of Laurentian property for the creation of a forestry reserve. His plan was to build a tuberculosis sanatorium in a completely protected environment. The proposal, originally drafted in 1893, was accepted in July 1894. Dr. Laviolette had studied in Paris, London and Berlin. He was a member of la Société Française d’Otologie et de Laryngologie de Paris, a specialist at l’Institution des Sourdes et Muettes, and was a medical doctor at the University of Laval. He planned the Sanatorium d’Altitude pour la tuberculose which was to be situated only four miles from the St. Jovite railroad station on the south-east face of La Montagne Tremblante (Trembling Mountain). The “Act to establish the Trembling Mountain Park” was voted into law on January 12, 1895. It set aside 14,750 acres for the forest reserve and an additional 400 acres for the treatment complex, and the property was to be available “to any persons or corporations who furnish sufficient sureties that they will erect and maintain such sanatorium…” While the land was reserved, the sanatorium was never built.According to F. Ryan, author of Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told, an estimated one billion people died of tuberculosis between 1700 and 1900. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that the world population did not reach two billion until 1930. Today, we talk of pandemics such as the flu that struck during World War One and the risks of avian flu. In the 18th and 19th centuries, our cities were hit by plagues of cholera and smallpox. All of these come and go. Tuberculosis, or consumption as it was also called, just sat there and took its toll year after year, cutting people down in the prime of life, disrupting families and weakening communities. It was, and still is, highly contagious through airborne bacteria.For most of the 1800s, there was no conception of bacteria, and people believed that the disease itself lived in a miasma that floated in the air in low, damp areas, and that the night mists and fog could carry disease. People believed this viscerally. Mothers would fear night chills as though they were ghosts. The wealthy would build high up the hill, not just for the view, but also to distance themselves from the miasma. Fogs hanging in the valleys were sinister.Forty-five years ago, students were still x-rayed for TB in the schools. Everyone was involved in fund-raisings, selling stamps showing the cross with the double horizontal bar, the symbol of the International Union Against Tuberculosis. Fear of tuberculosis pervaded society and almost everyone knew someone who had gone to a sanatorium for the rest cure.The rest cure was discovered serendipitously in the 1850s when Hermann Brehmner, a German botany student, moved to the Himalayas to die. He was consumptive, that is to say he had tuberculosis, and the odds were that it would simply progress until he withered away. Removed from his urban environment, with all its pressures, he began to recover, and in time he had completely regained his health. Leaving botany, he went back to school and studied medicine, proposing in his doctoral thesis that tuberculosis could be cured. He went on to pioneer the rest cure, building a large sanatorium in the mountains where patients would be fed a well-balanced diet and forced to rest, spending the days on balconies in the clean, cool mountain air, wrapped against the cold.Dr. Edward Trudeau, the grandfather of the cartoonist Gary Trudeau, lived an almost parallel experience, leaving New York City and moving to Saranac Lake to die. When he first arrived, he was so close to death that a man had to carry him to his room, remarking that he weighed no more than a light bag. He began a sanatorium there, in the 1880s.Dr. Laviolette’s project was never used in the treatment of tuberculosis. Given the credentials of Dr. Arthur Richer, founder of the first tuberculosis sanatorium to open up in Ste. Agathe, and Dr. Laviolette’s less appropriate, albeit impressive, credentials, one might wonder if there ever was a sincere intention of building a sanatorium on the location that the government set aside for Dr. Laviolette’s dream. If the intentions were sincere, it is curious that Dr. Richer did not take advantage of the reserve of 400 acres that was set aside for that purpose. His hospital was open by 1899. Surely the planning started a few years before that. Surely he would have been told.The act creating the park contained a curious stipulation. Clause 4 read “This act shall not affect any rights acquired under any license to cut timber or any lease to any person or to any fish and game club.” A short article some years later (1902) in the St. Jerome paper L’Avenir du Nord deplored the monopolisation and misuse of public lands for maintaining an exclusive fish and game club effectively protected by the reserve land. The article suggested that the club members had friends in high places and that the $50 per year cost was a gift; it was worth twice that amount, the article claimed. Listed among the activities that Dr. Laviolette envisioned for his patients were fishing, hunting, bathing and canoeing in summer; music, parlour games, snow-shoeing, tobogganing, skating, hunting and ice fishing in winter. It is hard to imagine these terminally ill patients taking advantage of such elaborate facilities.By 1954, a cure had been found for tuberculosis and today, few people are aware of the shadow that the disease once cast. It no longer seems important whether the intentions of the politicians were sincere or self-serving. We all live with a half-conscious faith that the politicians will be there for us again the next time we are confronted with a real enemy.Ref: the National Archives in Ottawa.

Ivry-sur-le-Lac

In 1891, Viscount Émile Ogier d’Ivry passed away in Chêne-de-C?ur, France, leaving behind his wife Angèle and their three children. Angèle’s biggest challenge as the dowager of an important family was to make sure the children established themselves appropriately. Raoul, her eldest son and the new Viscount had suffered from cerebral meningitis as a teenager and his intellectual ability had remained that of a 14-year-old. He was in his late twenties, and with his handicap he was not the ideal head of the family. Thankfully, he was an adorable, charming, active young man and he already had a devoted spouse, Elza. Angèle undertook to relocate this fine young couple to Canada telling them that their mission would be to establish the Ogier d’Ivry name in the New World. They travelled across the Atlantic, up the St. Lawrence and to the frontier of French Canada of the time, a town just beyond the reach of the railroad called Ste. Agathe. One imagines that from Ste. Adèle north, they must have travelled with a retinue and made quite an impression. There Angèle met the writer and journalist B.A.T. de Montigny who had recently, and perhaps reluctantly, acquired his uncle Pierre Casimir Bohémier’s farm. This family, also descended from gentry, was just the ticket for Angèle. She purchased their farm for her son and returned to France, where sadly she discovered that her only other son Jean was terminally ill with tuberculosis.Raoul began his ambitious project of establishing a new Ogier dynasty in this pioneer French outpost in Canada. He built a large country house and barns on the lake and he never missed an opportunity to display his family’s illustrious emblem and title. He was generally well received and over time he always managed to pay his bills upon receipt of a remittance from his mother. With the security of this money he tried his hand at farming, but soon tired of it and sold the property to a group from Montreal who began a cross-country ski lodge, the Manitou Club. Pictures of the house can be seen in Neil and Catharine McKenty’s recent book Skiing Legends and the Laurentian Lodge Club. Ogier d’Ivry also acquired an additional property where he was told he could mine iron and titanium, but it never produced any viable ore and today is a water-filled cave entry in the woods. During the prewar period, Ogier ran a tour boat on Lake Manitou and had one of the nicest boats on the lake, although not everyone appreciated it. Steam-driven, it relied on wood for its fuel and sparks flew from its stack, at one point igniting and burning Oliver’s Point (today the Manitou Valley Road).In the years after the arrival of the train, the lake became a recreational destination and many Montreal families established homes on the shores. Shortly before the First World War, Ste. Agathe experienced a tax revolt that degenerated into a bitter power struggle between the priorities of the local town and those of these new residents. The town’s power base consisted of its local member of the legislature in Québec and whatever influence he could muster, while the second residence owners, generally influential businessmen in Montreal, could resort to various and generally more influential members from their urban ridings. On top of that, the rural riding in question was in the process of being divided, a much-needed redistribution but poorly timed for Ste. Agathe. The issue was settled in 1912 when the provincial legislature passed a bill creating the municipality of Ivry-sur le-Lac. Viscount Raoul Ogier d’Ivry was the region’s best-known and most colourful citizen, and when his name was adopted for the new town, he must have felt that the universe was unfolding as it should. In the 1912 Album historique de la paroisse de Ste-Agathe a page is set aside to announce the creation of Ivry, with a picture of the Manitou Club, the “ancien château du Vicomte”. To one side is a picture of a surprised looking M. A. L’Allier, postmaster for Ivry and disenfranchised councillor, and on the other side, a dashing looking man in a fur hat described as Vicomte R.O. d’Ivry.When the Great War began, Gaétan, the Viscount’s only son, went overseas and enlisted with the British to fight for the liberation of France. The Viscount put his boat up in dry-dock and declared he would not float it again until his son returned, but after the war, Gaétan discovered his many cousins in Chêne-de-C?ur. His aunt, who lived to 99, had 13 healthy children. Gaétan ultimately re-established himself in France, acquiring the family manse from his aunt, and today Raoul’s grandson Phillippe, Comte Ogier d’Ivry resides in Chêne-de-C?ur.In 1930, Raoul’s mother passed away and his circumstances deteriorated dramatically. He and Elza moved into lesser accommodations and even began to depend upon a small garden with the stoic perspective of the impoverished noble. His daughters married and moved away. Elza died in 1950; the Viscount followed shortly after in 1952, but just before his death learned that the last male in the line of the Comte Ogier d’Ivry had passed away, causing the title of Count to devolve to him.Special thanks to Comte Philippe Ogier d’Ivry for help in preparing the foregoing.

L’Estérel and Lac Masson

Trains and railways fascinated Edouard-Louis-Joseph Empain. Born in Belœil, Belgium, in 1852, he worked his way through university, but by the time he was 29 years old, he had founded the Empain Bank and he began to indulge his obsession with public transport. Empain built train tracks across France, Belgium and Holland. He also experimented with electric trams, supplying a long list of cities with their first public transit systems. He built Le Paris Métropolitain, (the Parisian subway system, known locally as Le Métro) the Cairo transit system and a railway through China. He built a railway in the Belgian Congo and was involved in hydroelectric projects and many other initiatives. For his pleasure, he founded the town of Heliopolis outside Cairo and built a Hindu palace there. His great accomplishments, particularly in the Congo, led King Leopold II of Belgium to recognise him with the title of Baron in 1907.When he passed away in 1929, he left an estate estimated to be worth six billion French francs to his two sons Jean-Louis Lain Empain and Louis-Jean Lain Empain. Whereas their father was the first Baron Empain, by Belgian rules, they both inherited the title.Baron Jean-Louis Empain, the elder brother, took over the management of their father’s holdings, while Baron Louis-Jean took his inheritance in money and began anew, setting up La Banque Belge pour l’Industrie, and looked for projects. Starting in the Middle East, he sought a totally new environment, one where he could distinguish himself from his brother, and this notion brought him eventually to Canada.Both brothers also inherited good business practices from their father, and so, when Baron Louis-Jean came to Canada for the first time in 1934, he was already well prepared, and acquainted with the business and power elite. Only 26 years old, he had at his disposal the means to hire the best advisors and to meet the most influential people. He retained the services of a lawyer named Leon-Mercier Gouin, son of the ex-premier Lomer Gouin, and grandson of Honoré Mercier, a legendary Quebec nationalist who had also been premier. L-M Gouin, who would one day be named to the Senate, was also closely linked with the newly formed Union Nationale. The Baron immediately set upon the task he had in mind, creating investment companies and establishing a Belgian-Canadian spirit of cooperation, even going so far as to create l’Association Belgique-Canada.Empain seems to have been guided by a vision of idealism and was called by some the capitalist of the left. In 1935 he created La Belgo-Canadienne de Crédit Ltée, acquiring forestry and mining concerns, and backing philanthropies. He also acquired some 5000 acres of land in Ste. Marguerite du Lac Masson, calling it L’Estérel, after the Massif de l’Estérel in the south of France, and began an ambitious development there.Around that time, the Sulpician Order of Oka, having seriously overextended themselves in the creation of Université de Montréal, appealed to the provincial government to save them from their creditors. Under the guidance of Athanase David, at the time the Provincial Secretary for Education, the government passed a bill through which the university property was merged with the large Sulpician holdings in Oka, and subsequently the merged enterprise sold 3,700 acres of cultivated land and 1,600 acres of forestland in Oka to Baron Louis-Jean Empain. The university was saved and what was once the Sulpician seigneury became the property of the ambitious Belgian. Without displaying bitterness, one of the senior members of the Sulpician Order remarked that the Baron would have some unfinished business to settle with the Mohawks. Soon the Sulpician land was being marketed to Belgian immigrants who wished to establish farms in Oka, and the Baron created support systems to help them.The remarkable growth and rate of acquisition hit a wall with the beginning of the war. Baron Empain and his new bride, Geneviève Hone of Montreal, were in Belgium when the German army occupied the country. Rumours swirled around the couple in Canada, and he was accused of being a German spy, was said to have been detained and held prisoner by the Canadian authorities and was generally pilloried in the press. The Canadian government went so far as to sequester all of the Baron’s Canadian holdings, justifying its actions because, as principal shareholder, he resided in a country under enemy occupation.Meanwhile, in Belgium, the Baron and his wife organized a charity called Pro Juventute, created to feed and care for needy children. Faced with the risk of imminent invasion, the Belgian government called up all available men, creating an army of 700,000, and the Baron reported for duty. He participated in the heroic “Campaign of 18 Days,” a series of battles that slowed the German advance and is considered to have given surprised Allied troops precious extra time to evacuate Dunkirk. He was captured and became a German prisoner, but was soon released, probably because the Germans needed to cultivate good relations with the powerful industrial family. He spent the balance of the war in charitable activities, following his youthful charges and creating Collège de la Hulle to make sure that they got a good start in life.When the war ended, the Baron could not bring himself to forgive the Canadian government for the hardships and the insult of having treated him so badly. Married to a Canadian, volunteering for duty against the enemy, enduring prison and assisting the needy before and during the war period, he felt that the Canadian government would act as his ally. He instructed his managers to sell his Canadian holdings and concentrated on his philanthropy for the balance of his career. He is still fondly remembered by graduates of Collège de la Hulle, but his Canadian dreams were left to be fulfilled by others. ***On a fateful summer day in 1958, Fridolin Simard was flying over the Laurentians headed from his home in Alma to Montreal. From the window of his small floatplane, the rolling hills of the Laurentians unfolded, their jewel-like lakes twinkling in the sun, but off ahead of him, to the southwest, he was heading into dark thunderclouds piled above the horizon. His radio crackled with a message from the control tower at Dorval warning him and all small planes to change flight plans because the storm was playing havoc with the airport.Below him, Simard could see a good-sized lake, easy to land on, and his charts told him it was called Lac Masson. The charts could not tell him that, like him, Joseph Masson had moved from the Quebec countryside to Montreal and gone into business there. When Masson arrived in Montreal in 1812, he had no money, but he had apprenticed as a shop clerk in St. Eustache, and he soon proved his worth to Hugh Robertson. With no capital to invest, he nevertheless grew to become a junior partner, and eventually a full partner, in the Robertson brothers’ firm. A visionary and risk-taker, he became the purchaser and a partner in the Robertsons’ concerns in Glasgow, Scotland, as well. Trading principally in potash and woollens, Masson encouraged the firm to buy ships, and he was also a co-founder of the Company of Proprietors of the Champlain and St Lawrence Railroad in 1846.Masson, like Simard, did not know that French-Canadians were handicapped in business, and during the difficult period of the 1830s, he was one of the most important businessmen in Lower Canada. He was a member of the Legislative Council, the ruling elite known as the Chateau Clique, in the stormy 1830s, and while he was sympathetic to the objectives of the Patriotes, his loyalty was to the mercantile class. He eventually became the sole owner of the import-export companies in both Scotland and Montreal when the Robertson brothers retired, and he brought his sons into the business. Joseph Masson, Sons and Company had offices in Montreal, Quebec City and Glasgow with marketing and buying offices in Three Rivers, Liverpool and Toronto. Eventually he acquired the Seigneurie of Terrebonne, and it was his son, Edouard Masson, who undertook to colonise the area around Lac Masson in the 1860s.Simard landed safely before the storm and found his way to a dock where he could secure the plane. His business expertise was in asphalt and concrete blocks, pier, bridge and tunnel construction, and his family concern, Simard-Beaudry, had grown out of their hometown offices in Alma to spread across Quebec and Ontario. Taking shelter in a building near the dock on Lac Masson, Simard discovered that he was in an elaborate, abandoned complex. On one wall, he found a map describing the whole lake with projections for a development. He explored further.In 1864, Edouard Masson had been accorded 1600 acres to establish his colony, and even though it was not a seigneury, he invested heavily to develop it, building both a saw and flour mill. Most of the colonists came from further south in the old Seigneury of Terrebonne. The first post office, called Lac Masson, opened in 1868. Its naming served the dual purpose of honouring Edouard Masson and confirming the name of the lake. By 1880, the municipality took its name from the parish mission and the post office and became Ste. Marguerite du Lac Masson. Like many of these Laurentian projects, Masson’s small colony experienced difficulties when the bulk of the wood was gone and the farmers had to rely on the thin mountain soil. While the railroad brought some improvement, it would take Baron Empain to identify the lake’s real potential in the 1930s. He envisioned a tourist centre on the lake and he engaged the best people he could find to plan and build it. To complement his hotel, cinema and shopping centre and give it a fresh identity, he established a post office in 1939, calling it L’Estérel after the Massif de l’Estérel in the south of France.Among the properties Empain left behind when he returned to Europe at the beginning of World War Two, was this large art deco recreation and tourism complex which sat abandoned for years until Simard stood in it examining the map posted on the wall. Empain’s plans, Simard discovered, involved the construction of 300 houses, a hotel and a cultural centre, but no provision was made for Empain’s absence.As though the spirit of the place had conspired to grab him out of the sky, Simard soon discovered that the property was for sale. Piqued by the ruins of Empain’s vision sitting on the pristine lake named for Masson, Simard determined to complete the dreams of both of his predecessors. Acquiring the remaining Empain-Masson holdings, he built a large hotel and golf course and developed the lakefront with expensive country homes. In order to better manage his project, he obtained a separate municipal status, and inspired again by Empain’s name for the post office, he called it L’Estérel.Sources: Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Website of L’Estérel, Toponymie Québec and others.

Chemin Wheeler, Mont Tremblant

George and Lucille Wheeler moved to St. Jovite from Chazy, New York in 1894 with their new baby in tow. George had acquired a large parcel of forestland the year before, and Lucille, determined to be with him, chose to forego a life of relative ease. Arriving in Montreal, even the conductor of the train expressed his surprise that George was taking that beautiful girl off into the woods. The passenger accommodations consisted of a wooden boxcar with seats down the side, a space heater at one end, and spittoons placed strategically along the aisle. Boistrous, tobacco-chewing lumberjacks made token efforts to hit the spittoons in the tight, putrid atmosphere for the eleven-hour transit from Montreal to St. Jovite.George set Lucille and the baby up in the lumberjacks hotel. The building had no indoor plumbing and the vermin-infested room was a cold catch-all for the smells permeating from the tavern-like dining room below. The village consisted of a few French-Canadian families who made it clear that they didnt want any intruders, interlopers, in their community. Within a short time Lucille moved, setting up simple housekeeping at her husbands lumber camp.They built themselves a house on the shore of Lac Ouimet, with a boathouse allowing them to cross the lake rather than having to walk around it. They soon had all of their possessions shipped up from Chazy, and Lucille soon gave birth to her daughter, Frances. In the meantime, Lucille found that she could develop very little social interchange with the French-Canadian women on the outlying farms. They married as young as 15, had many children, and their lifestyles were even less refined than George and Lucilles. Being a closed Roman Catholic community, Protestants such as the Wheelers were not welcome and had even been asked to leave. They knew that, should any hardship befall them, they could not assume that the Catholic community would rally to their cause. Luckily, two other Protestant families soon established themselves in St. Jovite.One night their young daughter began to scream and they awoke to see flames belching out of the woodshed. George knew that he had time to get the family and some friends who were visiting out of the house, and he went back in to save some of their personal belongings. Lucille leaned a ladder against the upper window and pleaded with him to get out. When he did, the house roared into a blaze and everything inside was lost.Lucille moved in with one of the Protestant families over the next period, while George refurbished the boathouse where the family lived in the single room through most of the winter.The information that we have about the Wheelers during this time comes from Frances Wheelers book, The Awakening of the Laurentians. In it she describes not only the rough conditions in which her family lived, but also some of the neighbours, such as a domineering fellow nicknamed the man of a hundred bears. Aside from having killed many bears, he was also shaped like one, with short legs and a large upper body. He once offered George to trade his wife and a cow for Lucille. Frances also describes the wildlife, hearing the wolves howl in the night and the bears occasionally exploring the garbage and pawing the door. She even observes that people did not travel at night.After George rebuilt their home, and life returned to normal with a third child, Ruth, the winter snows stopped co-operating. For two winters, there was not enough snow to skid lumber from the bush, and their livelihood was threatened. Their baby Ruth became ill with meningitis and passed away, and in 1898 both George and Lucille, who was pregnant, contracted typhoid. Of course, the family had to abandon their homestead and the two children went to live with other family members. The doctors advised the families to prepare for the worst, and they made plans for adoptive homes for Tom and Frances and sold off all of their property in the Laurentians.When both patients recovered, and George Junior was born, they discovered that their property had been sold for a pittance. Like the mythical Sisyphus, the Greek who defied the gods and was condemned to an eternity of pushing a rock up a hill, they returned to Lac Ouimet and started over, again. They bought land and built a great new home that they called Gray Rocks. George contracted to build two homes for other Protestant families that had moved to the lake, and eventually they began to charge their guests, friends who had been coming for years, and to encourage others.Although they had seven children, two more were lost over the ensuing years, George Junior, who was never well, and Roy who died in an accident. They were also visited again by fire, only this time it raged through the forest, jumping over their home and consuming everything in their view. It started on a spring afternoon, and George had the children carry wet blankets from the lake to soak the house and the cedar shake roof. At one point, he marshalled the family to wait in the cold lake, but thought better of it. Neighbours gave them up for lost, being incapable of getting through to help, but by morning the fire had moved on and the house was standing in a black world.Despite these great hardships the Wheeler family established one of the most popular destinations in the Laurentians, adding a ski hill and golf course over time. Their son Tom started Canadas first airline on Lac Ouimet, a story in itself, and their granddaughter Lucille won Canadas first Olympic medal in skiing in 1956 and broke the European stranglehold on giant slalom and downhill skiing at the world ski championships in Austria in 1958.Chemin Wheeler in Mont Tremblant was proclaimed in 1918 and most likely served to render official the name local residents gave to the road that went from the railroad station to the home of this intrepid pioneer family. Today, only a short stretch of the road running from the highway to the old Lac Ouimet Club still carries the name.References The Awakening of the Laurentians, -Frances Wheeler; Mme M.L. Guilbeault, Service de la Greffe, Mont Tremblant; Canadian Encyclopedia; Wikipedia.

Baumgarten’s Ski Hill, Ste. Agathe

One problem with history is that there are a lot of living people who want to decide what happened before they came along, making recent history rife with competition and chauvinism. There is no truth in history beyond what we believe happened, and the most honest historian rewrites the past. That is how Baumgarten’s ski hill in Ste. Agathe may have lost its status as the first rope tow in Canada.

Don’t look for Baumgarten’s on the map. Go to the town of Ste. Agathe and look for someone older, or at least middle-aged, and ask where Baumgarten’s was. She will tell you to take Tour du Lac up where those new condos are, you know, the apartment ones right on the water blocking everyone else’s view, and go along to Dazé Street. Turn right, and you will see a hill up above, on the left. She might add that it’s gone, that all you will see is houses, and wonder how long you’ve been looking. She won’t think to tell you what Baumgarten’s was – unless you happen to buy her a coffee or take a long walk together. She won’t likely have a bunch of photos with her, but she might tell you about all the people who skied there, and she might mention Moise Paquette and his rope tow. But that was a long time ago.

Moise Paquette, a genuine ‘patenteur,’ built a rope tow from an old car. In the early days this could have consisted of attaching a good stretch of rope to a modified car, lifting one of its wheels like a dog marking its territory, and pulling skiers up to the top of a hill. Paquette managed to put a few more pulleys in there, to guide the rope, eventually patenting the technique and started installing them lots of other places. He built one on Baumgarten’s, but if she tells you categorically that Baumgarten’s was the first rope tow, she might look nervously around first, to see who else is listening. Be ready to hear about Alex Foster’s rope tow, called Foster’s Folly, in Shawbridge. Which one came first? Anyone can remember that the rope tows worked, but no one bothered writing down the dates. One historian managed to diplomatically suggest that Foster could have hired Paquette to help modify the local taxi that pulled people up the Big Hill in Shawbridge. Your hostess in Ste. Agathe might boldly tell you that it happened in 1930, or 1931. Even if she’s old, she likely doesn’t really know.

Foster was a daredevil, a ski jumper from the big city who was training for the ’32 Olympics, when he had an accident that wrecked his knee. It might have been the injury that motivated him to find a mechanical solution for getting ‘up’ the hill. Moise Paquette, a blacksmith who was born in the 1880s, could not keep his hands off any mechanical device. Around ’25 or ‘26 he acquired parts of a plane because he wanted its 9-cylinder rotary engine. He modified a fuselage, eliminating the wings and offered skiers a rope to hang on to behind the body of the craft as it tore its way across Lac des Sables. The motor had no throttle. It was either ‘off’ or ‘on’, so it could reach remarkable speeds. He handcrafted the propeller and the skis himself, laminating wood for his specific needs. He called it the Aero-Ski – she might tell you about it, but if you want the details, you will have to find one of Moise’s descendants – like the mayor.

After Moise passed away in ‘65, his family found a lot of legal notices filed against him complaining about the noise. Early ski joring was a quiet ride behind a horse, but Paquette had no shortage of takers for his exciting, noisy alternative. People were looking for a rush, and the Aero-Ski provided it, even if it woke the dead.

At the hill in nineteen thirty whatever, Paquette’s son, Maurice, home from school, sat at the controls of the stationary engine that pulled people up – well at least the people who paid and hung on. He applied gas as needed for the load of people clinging to the rope and had been told to get anyone off who didn’t pay. Shoving the old truck engine into reverse, he could watch from below as they fell over backwards. If a friend asked, though, he would speed things up to help them get to the top faster. Why this is important is it helps us figure out what year it was, or at least that’s the theory. Since Maurice was born in ’13 and was home from school, it must have been around 1930.

Paquette became the foremost expert on early tows and Baumgarten’s hill continued to operate even after he died. He owned the Ford Motors concession, was the British American Oil distributor and contracted with the army during World War II to test engines for their winter-worthiness. Foster used a slightly different technique that did not conflict with Paquette’s patent, although it was more prone to tangling. If stories make it true, maybe once they are told, someone will be able to decide which of the two rope tows came first, Baumgarten or the Big Hill. If someone else is listening in over coffee, you will hear the whole debate. It would be too bad if we actually found out and the debate was settled. We’d have to look for other stories – like discovering who Baumgarten was.

***

Everyone used to know exactly where to go if you offered to get together at Baumgarten’s. In fact, a lot of people learned to ski there. Places, spaces, destinations can be lost and forgotten, like a pair of gloves when they stop being used. Baumgarten has been dead for longer than he was alive. His house, once a majestic round-log home with a commanding view of the lake, now sits at 154 Tour du Lac in Ste. Agathe looking at a bank of condos on his huge beach. The ski hill that bore his name has grown into a copse of prefab houses. Nothing is really left but the memory.

Alfred Baumgarten was born in Germany in 1842, the son of the King of Saxony’s personal physician. A chemist, he made his way first to the United States and then to Canada, manufacturing sugar from sugar beets. He founded the St. Lawrence Sugar Refinery and was known as the Sugar King of Canada. Having grown up in a king’s court, he felt most comfortable with the wealthy and powerful, so he joined the Montreal Hunt Club.

You can’t tell the story of Baumgarten without talking about the Hunt, another subject that is fading from our common memory. We have all heard of the British aristocracy who chase foxes on horseback watching their packs of dogs track and corner them. People have strong opinions about the propriety of things like that today; it fits in the same category as wearing furs. In Montreal, though, and to some extent in the Laurentians, fox hunting was very proper in the late 1800s and even up to the First World War. It was an expensive hobby, and that by itself set the standard.

The fox hunt, called the Hunt, was the sport of the well-to-do, with large outings taking place in swamplands and on farms on the island of Montreal and in parts of the Laurentians. Like the early skiers, the organisers had to take pains to keep the farmers happy, settling any differences promptly and generously. They even organised a huge farmers’ fair, called a farmers’ frolic, on the Exhibition Grounds at the corner of Cote St. Catherine Road and Park Avenue in Montreal. They would bring in entertainment as involved as the Royal Japanese Troupe of Acrobats, and ply the men with beer and the women with sugar, roasting a full ox on an open spit. Their budget for promotion and goodwill ran around $60,000 a year (equivalent to several millions today).

As successful as Baumgarten was with St. Lawrence Sugar, he seemed more interested in the Hunt. It defined a man. Officers were men, and he lived in the shadow of the age of chivalry (a word that comes from horse). Even as late as World War One, the officer class was still on horseback. It was a caste society in which the rich and powerful rode horses and the rest used them at best to pull a sleigh or carriage. It wasn’t solely the horseless carriage that ended this paradigm. It had a lot of help from the World War One trenches, from gas attacks and from new military equipment like tanks. Baumgarten, who died at the end of the age of the horse, could fit into the right society on horseback. That was probably why he built a substantial property for the Hunt Club on Delorimier Avenue in Montreal in 1882. It included a large banquet room, a dance hall whose floor sat on springs to put spring in the steps of the dancers, a swimming pool described as “an oriental plunge bathroom all inlaid with white tiles” and a steam cleaner in the kennels for the hounds. He became the 18th Master of the Hunt from 1882 to 1887, and of the 35 masters, his name rates the most entries in the index of the Club’s history.

Baumgarten was famous for his parties, and, when the Hunt Club moved to Cote. Ste. Catherine Road, he took the ballroom springs and installed them in the ballroom of his home on McTavish Street (now the McGill Faculty Club), where he spared no expense in the care of his three marriageable daughters.

Compared to McTavish Street and the Clubhouse, his luxurious home in Ste. Agathe was a log cabin. On the lakeside of the Tour du Lac Road, he built a large, round-log house that shows some of the influences of the Maxwell brothers. It eventually had stables and galleries and dominated the hillside overlooking the lake. The house stands today, ringed by townhouse condos. His large brick stables still exist, having evolved through being a recreational centre with an indoor skating rink to being further converted into apartments. The balance of the land north of the road became the Manor House, now La Calèche, and the fields going up the mountain became the ski hill. Early photos show people skiing behind horses – ski-joring – a sport that he most likely witnessed with no idea how the skiing part of it would displace his horses from his fields and trails.

Alfred Baumgarten retired in 1912 at the age of seventy, but his last years were not easy. Despite his support of three Montreal hospitals and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, when the First World War began, he was shunned by a lot of his old friends. People cast aspersions that he was a German sympathiser, and later there were even allegations that he had offered succour to German spies. He died in 1919, and while there is no official memorial to him, he still lives in the memory of the people of Ste. Agathe.